The workpiece pick-up apparatus is an apparatus for picking up workpieces one by one through use of a robotic hand from an object containing a plurality of bulked workpieces. As a conventional workpiece pick-up apparatus, there is an apparatus disclosed in, for example, Patent Literature 1. This apparatus is configured to assume a representative profile of a workpiece, prestore data on partial profile units, which are obtained by segmenting the workpiece, and priorities corresponding to the respective partial profiles, perform image processing on a plurality of bulkedworkpieces so as to calculate a plurality of partial profiles as candidates for a gripping position, and determine, from among the calculated candidates, a workpiece as an object to be picked up and a gripping portion thereof in consideration of the above-mentioned priorities.
In the above-mentioned method of picking up a workpiece as disclosed in Patent Literature 1, however, the following problems may arise.
As a first problem, under the condition that the number of calculated candidates for a gripping position is small, when the hand is to grip the workpiece determined from among the candidates, there is such a high risk that the hand cannot reach the gripping position due to interference between the hand and the workpieces other than the object to be gripped, or to disturbance of the other workpieces. In order to avoid this problem, it is necessary to calculate a large number of candidates for a gripping position in advance, but in this case, there in turn arises a problem in that the labor, calculation time, and data amount are increased considerably.
As a second problem, the operations of obtaining the partial profiles through segmentation and assigning the priorities to the respective partial profiles need to be defined newly for the profiles of hands different from each other. For this reason as well, there arises a problem in that the labor and calculation time are increased.